What happened on 15 August?

28 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 1947 Indian independence and Partition Mountbatten oversees rushed partition of British India into India and Pakistan; up to a million die in resulting violence.
2. 1945 VJ Day / surrender of Japan Japan announces acceptance of unconditional surrender; formal signing follows aboard USS Missouri on 2 September.
3. 1914 Panama Canal opens US engineering effort completes a route across the Isthmus of Panama; transforms global shipping.
4. 1947 Premiership of Jawaharlal Nehru Seventeen years building the Indian state: planning, non-alignment, linguistic states and the 1962 war with China.
5. 1971 Nixon ends the gold standard The 'Nixon shock' suspends the dollar's convertibility to gold, ending the Bretton Woods system and floating the world's currencies.
6. 1649 Cromwellian conquest of Ireland Brutal English campaign that killed and displaced a large fraction of Ireland's population.
7. 1851 Australian gold rush Discoveries in Victoria triple Australia's population in a decade.
8. 1945 Liberation of Korea Japan's surrender ends 35 years of colonial rule over Korea; celebration is quickly shadowed by Soviet-American division of the peninsula at the 38th parallel.
9. 1867 Reform Act 1867 Disraeli's act roughly doubles the male electorate by enfranchising urban working class householders; "leap in the dark".
10. 1947 Integration of princely states into India Patel and V. P. Menon negotiate accession of 562 princely states.
11. 1969 Woodstock Festival Three-day rock festival in upstate New York; touchstone of the counterculture.
12. 1969 Indian Space Research Organisation founded ISRO established.
13. 1998 Omagh bombing Real IRA car bomb kills 29 in Omagh; deadliest single bombing of the Troubles; turns public opinion decisively against violence.
14. 1900 The court flees Beijing As the Eight-Nation Alliance breaches the walls, Cixi dresses as a peasant, has the Guangxu Emperor's favourite concubine thrown down a well, and escapes in a cart on a two-month f
15. 1872 Born: Aurobindo Ghose Indian philosopher and nationalist.
16. 1984 PKK insurgency begins The Kurdistan Workers' Party launches an armed campaign for Kurdish autonomy, beginning a conflict that has killed tens of thousands.
17. 1979 Apocalypse Now released Vietnam War film transposing Heart of Darkness into the Cambodian jungle.
18. 1985 The Rubicon speech disappoints the world With the townships in flames and the world told P.W. Botha will announce sweeping reform, he delivers a finger-wagging refusal instead: 'Don't push us too far.' Within weeks the ba
19. 1969 Sarabhai founds the Indian Space Research Organisation Sarabhai argues a poor country needs satellites precisely because it is poor — for weather, communications and education.
20. 1944 Operation Dragoon lands in the south of France The invasion Churchill fought to cancel: American and French armies land on the Riviera against light resistance, take Marseille — soon the Allies' single biggest supply port — and
21. 1549 Francis Xavier's mission to Japan Jesuit Francis Xavier arrives in Kagoshima; opens Japan to Catholic missionary activity for nearly a century.
22. 1461 Fall of Trebizond Mehmed II annexes the Empire of Trebizond, extinguishing the last independent Byzantine Greek successor state eight years after Constantinople fell.
23. 1863 Britain bombards Kagoshima The Royal Navy shells the Satsuma capital in reprisal for the murder of a British merchant. Satsuma takes the lesson to heart — within two years the domain is buying British warshi
24. 778 Battle of Roncevaux Pass Basques ambush Charlemagne's rearguard in the Pyrenees, later immortalised in the Song of Roland.
25. 1892 William Gladstone's fourth premiership At eighty-two Gladstone carries a Second Home Rule Bill through the Commons, only for the Lords to kill it.
26. 1248 Cologne Cathedral begun Construction of Cologne Cathedral begins in Gothic style; halted in the 16th century, finally completed in 1880.
27. 1975 Sholay Landmark 1975 Bollywood action film; long the canonical Indian blockbuster.
28. 1975 Bachchan in Sholay Two small-time crooks are hired to catch a bandit; the most successful Indian film ever made, and the one that fixed Bachchan as the angry young man.